The crack of the bullets is strangely muted, the flashes of light and the way Mitch reels back recalling movies I’ve seen of guns. But my mind still doesn’t make sense of what I’ve just seen until the other Wasters step forward out of the darkness with guns of their own, shots ringing out – muted – flashes of light tearing the Showdown people down.
And then I throw myself down, terrified compression crashing over me. Guns. They have guns. Actual guns. The ground is wet and cold and seems to draw the very life from my skin as the anathemas swarm forward, shooting. Screams flood the night over the roar of crashing waves as the Showdown folks try to flee, and find more Wasters have snuck in to ambush them.
All I can do is crawl from the chaos, the screams, until cold water from the ocean is seeping about my hands and knees. It goes on and on, the muted crackle of guns with silencers flashing in the night, bodies falling. I cover my ears, squeeze my eyes shut. The ocean pounds me, making my knees ache with cold, and I can’t believe this is happening, I can’t believe this.
It’s a long while before the last sputters of muted bullets have rung through the night and the last screams are gone. The vast line of trucks and cars belonging to the Showdown people still glow where they are lined up along the beach, doors open, shadowy bodies slumped over wheels. The cars they never left, the ones they tried to flee in.
“Find all of them.” Voices ring out around me. “Make sure none of them survived.”
I am shaking uncontrollably when Liam tromps across the sand, and kneels down next to me with a mild, friendly smile on his face. He’s illuminated only by the distant moon and stars and everything in me curdles away from him. I am so bone cold I feel like I’ve become ice.
“So,” Liam says casually, like a hundred people weren’t just murdered around us, “how did little Katie Grant lose herself citizenship?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Liam’s pulls me up. His hand finds my arm and locks there. He tells me to watch my step. We navigate soggy, water-slick rocks.
“Smell takes some getting used to,” Liam says cheerfully, “but I wouldn’t trade the people here. My kind of people, the whole lot. Careful. Dead body.”
A scream rises in my throat as we step on something soft and warm. Liam’s arms wrap around me, enveloping me in the smell of cigarette smoke. He hoists me forward across the damp sand.
“H-have they all d-d-died?” I’m not sure if it’s the cold or the terror halting my speech.
“Should have done.” He still sounds so merry about it all. “Can’t have them spreading word we’re holing up here with firearms.”
And then we’re descending in a cavern carved into the rocks, stepping over a stream of brackish water, moving through a makeshift door. Warmth envelops me as my eyes adjust to the dimness. Liam’s arms still hold me steady – or stop me from escaping – as we maneuver through a surprisingly large crowd of scruffy people milling about. They’re cleaning machetes. Laughing. Walking out with chainsaws and axes.
“I thought the killing was done.”
“Those are for corpse disposal,” Liam answers.
My legs give out.
He laughs and holds me up, even as tears begin to clog my throat. “These are just the small necessities of our existence here, love. We’re alive because when hunting guilds take a crack at us, we shoot them all. Of course, there are gun laws. The feds will send in the military if they ever find out we have firearms, so we have to get rid of all the evidence. Sit down. You sit down here.”
“Th-the footage…”
“Being destroyed as we speak. Do you think we’d leave evidence that we have guns out in the world?”
I clap a hand over my mouth.
“You stay right here. Get your bearings.” Liam withdraws, leaving me there. I look around, but I know I can’t run even if I want to. There are so many Wasters between me and the entrance to the cave.
I feel sick. Sick, sick.
“Kathryn.”
The voice, tentative, meek, startles me. My gaze jolts up at the girl who’s slipped up to me. Noelle has a gun tucked into her belt, and she makes a big show of turning her back to me like she isn’t talking to me.
“You need to be very careful,” she whispers to me as she scrapes some lines into the wall with a knife. “You can tell the Wasters I tipped you off about this place, but don’t tell them about my brother.”
“Noelle, they shot them all.”
She glances at me briefly, her eyes haunted hollows in her thin face. “What did you think would happen?”
I thought there’d be so many anathemas, the Showdown crew turned tail and ran. I can’t speak.
“It was their lives or ours. Remember what I said.” Then she darts away, leaving three new lines carved into the wall.
I stare up numbly at the columns of lines.
And then Liam saunters back in. “Looks like we have all of them.”
“All of them?” I say. “The entire Showdown crew?”
“If we did our job right.” He sprawls down next to me. “So Noelle tells me she let you know about our little community here. Very careless of her to wag her mouth about us. We don’t tend to share our secrets with outsiders until they have a higher hazard index.” He shrugs. “At least you’ve given us a present. We hate hunting enthusiasts here. Well, most of us do.” His tilts his head to the side, his eyes bright. “I glory in their visits. Had myself six tonight. Remind me to add to my tally.”
Tally.
My gaze flies to the wall. All those lines take on a new, sinister implication.
I’ve heard all about enthusiastic hunters. Never before have I heard about eager, murderous anathemas. Not outside of the movies populated with them. I grip the arms of the chair I’m in. It’s the only steady thing in the world right now.
Liam pulls a smashed pack of cigarettes from his leather jacket and lights one. He offers one to me. I shake my head, bile in my throat.
“You’re an anathema now, love. Not likely to live long enough to get lung cancer.”
I shake my head again, swallowing hard.
Liam accepts my refusal and watches me through a cloud of smoke. He’s scruffy, unshaven and totally alight with enjoyment after a slaughter. A psychopath in his element. No wonder he moved to the USA. He’s right at home.
My gaze roves the cavern we’re in, connected to that other, larger chamber. It’s even been wired with electricity. Lights glow in the corners. These must be caves lodged into the cliffs, hidden from sight. This entire place couldn’t have sprung up overnight. A lot of time, work, and money had to have poured into this. Something is generating power for this place. They have to have connections if they’re hiding this.
When Noelle said she lived in the Waste, I pictured an existence of poverty carved out of trash. I didn’t imagine there was an actual community carved into the rocks. Maybe they weren’t living the high life – that was evident from their clothes, from the edge of wariness on their faces – but they were existing better than I could have guessed.
Liam must see the curiosity on my face. “I see you admire our digs. The caves lead to the ocean. We get supplies in and out that way. Some Wasters take on day labor, or smuggling and the like to pay the bills. There are any number of uses for an anathema. We’re fine assassins. Can’t lose citizenship twice, after all. You’ve probably guessed my role around here.” He chomps on the end of his cigarette, half-grinning at me. “External security.”
The reminder makes my chest grow tight. I stare at Liam, that screw up British kid from school that I knew a million years ago. The boy who led a slaughter of what must’ve been a hundred people.
“So this is how you earn your keep here. You shoot trespassers.”
“Only the nasty ones,” Liam agrees. “Others, I just…” He mimes stabbing. “Do as the ancestors did. Less conspicuous. We have to hide evidence when bullets are involved. You’re sitting on some of our past handiwork.”
I look down at my c
hair—and spring to my feet with a shout. The armrest I was clutching is a thigh bone long bleached white. The chairs against the walls are all bones welded together. Nausea rolls through me, along with terror. As I gaze at them, I can see the remains of skulls with bullet holes in them peering at me with eyeless hollows. The world tilts. I feel like I’m going to pass out.
I flatten myself against the other wall of the cave. The ice cold granite calms me. I can’t look at those chairs again. I can’t.
For his part, Liam whips out a knife, and heads to a particular spot on the wall. As I watch, he slashes six lines next to an imposing column. His tally. Six deaths on his hands tonight.
These Wasters are psychopaths. Liam is a cheerful, grinning mass murderer. God, I want to go home. I don’t realize my eyes are closed until his cool fingers touch my chin, tilt my face up. “Are you going to faint, Katie? You look rather green.”
“Are you going to hurt me?” My voice is a jagged whisper.
His thumb strokes my chin. His fingers stink of tobacco. “Why would I do that, darling? You clearly didn’t bring the hunters here intending to hurt us. Just to… what? Keep them away from Alexander Metz?”
Something about the way he says the name is edged with danger. Remembering what Noelle said, I shake my head. “It wasn’t for Alexander. God, no. The Showdown people wouldn’t leave the school. I was trying to save myself. I met Noelle. She said there were anathemas around here. I thought maybe you guys could drive them off. I barely know Alexander.”
Liam takes a drag of his cigarette, considering me. He looks older than twenty-one. “I’ll be straight with you: Alexander Metz isn’t very well regarded around here. He wasn’t one to subscribe to the greater good for the Waster community idea. He had some shall we say, philosophical differences with us. He disliked obeying our patron, our boss. He refused to do his part.”
“Your boss?”
“The head honcho.” His smile reveals uneven teeth. “The boss funds our little operation here. Pulls the strings so nobody looks too hard into the electricity we’re using. All the boss asks in turn is a small service here and there.”
“So he’s like a crime lord.”
“I like to think of the boss as an entrepreneur who makes fine use of a readily available resource. That resource being yours truly, and other anathemas of the higher hazard index persuasion. The boss welcomes all us dangerous types. Metz was brought into the Waster fold, but he disliked taking orders. He refused to do his part, kill a person here and there, trash some property in Los Angeles and the like. He and I had a bit of a row. Then he absconded with a valuable possession of ours.” He peers at me closely through a cloud of smoke. “That property is the only reason we haven’t killed him. It’s rather valuable and we’d prefer Metz didn’t pass it off into the wrong hands.”
Suddenly I realize who it was Alexander talked about earlier, the enemies who’d pose a threat to Noelle if anyone realized they were brother and sister. He wasn’t just talking about hunters. He was talking about these anathemas here at the Waste.
It sounds like Alexander has some sort of leverage over them. If they ever find out about Noelle, they’ll have leverage over him. My article would have revealed the fact that they were related.
That’s what Noelle had been willing to risk for Alexander’s sake.
That’s what Alexander hadn’t been willing to let her risk.
Liam kneels down, leaning in very close. The stench of his cigarettes mounts in my nostrils. “Tell me honestly, for an old mate: how close are you to Alexander Metz?”
More than at any moment before in my life, I feel in danger. If Alexander is an enemy to these people, then I need to make sure they don’t see me as a friend of his. Every instinct tells me to keep my face as impassive as possible, even mildly disdainful.
“Not close at all.” My voice crackles with frost. “He beat up my boyfriend. The Showdown people were beginning to threaten me, so I wanted to take care of them. That’s all.”
“Oh, how glad I am to hear that. I’d hate to cut you up.”
I flinch back.
Liam laughs. “I’m playing with you. I’m hardly a barbarian. You can leave. No worries.”
“I can… go?”
He presses an earnest hand to his heart. “With my blessings. And my sincerest thanks for this glorious night. Do give us a word of warning about your plans, next time, though.”
I almost make it out of the room, but then Liam calls carelessly, “You never asked me your question.”
“What question?”
His eyes cling to mine, long-lashed and glittering with a dangerous playfulness. “You never asked me who the Boss is. Aren’t you even the slightest bit curious about the person who funds this operation? Most ask. But not you, for some reason.”
That sense of danger overtakes me again. This feels like a loaded question, though I don’t know why. “I don’t…” I fumble, “I don’t think I really want to know.”
He gazes at me for a long moment, eyes lightly narrowed, taking a long drag of his cigarette. It’s like there’s something more to his question than he’s asking and he’s trying to read some answer in my face. Then he smiles. “Clever girl. Do come back to us when you’ve got a few dead hunters in your belt. We do like useful people around here. We can get you a lot of George Washingtons.”
“One dollar bills?” I say, confused.
He waves it off. “Or whichever Americanism you people use to talk about obscene amounts of filthy, dirty cash.”
“Benjamin Franklins.”
“That’s the bloke.” He grins at me savagely. “Look how in sync we are. We could have a bright future together, darling.”
“Maybe one day.” Never. Never ever.
On edge, uneasy, I back away from him. My legs are shaking as I walk away. My heart pounds as I travel through curious anathemas, as I leave their lair. I stumble through the darkness and move numbly across the windy beach, around trash. I nearly trip over a familiar redhead. Bile rises in my throat the sight of Ezra, the host. The redheaded woman lies sprawled on her back, eyes wide open, her throat blown wide open. Nearby is Ezekiel’s crumpled body. His body, not his head. Even though they were closely protected at the rear of the vanguard, the hosts of Showdown still didn’t escape the carnage.
Suddenly I’m running, sprinting for the second time tonight, terror ripping through my veins. Cars fly past, anathemas pulling bodies out of them. Blades flash as they hack at them. Chainsaws roar. I cover my ears and keep running. I wish I could burn out my retinas rather than see another dead body. Another sign of what I did. This horrible thing I did.
Alexander’s words float back to me. “I never sleep through the night.”
I will never do it again, either.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I stay home sick from school for three days. My parents let me do it, even though several times my mother appears in my room. Her voice rings in my ear about the importance of an Asylum Scholarship. I don’t listen. I must look as awful as I feel, because she lets me off the hook.
During the day after my parents go to work, I grab the comforter off my bed and hole up in the panic room. I don’t care if there’s no threat anymore. Every sound outside – car doors closing, engines roaring – makes me cringe.
Dead bodies and Russell’s sneering face dance behind my closed eyelids.
Even semi-catatonic as I am, I can’t miss the news. My parents talk about it in the hallway outside my room. My father’s radio blares it from his study. There’s a breaking story all over the internet about the disappearance of the Showdown crew. Their cars were found trashed at the bottom of a cliff off Highway One. Their footage is missing.
It’s being called ‘The Shelter Valley Massacre’. The slaughter took place in Cordoba Bay but apparently the anathemas stashed the abandoned cars and wrecked equipment of the Showdown people in Shelter Valley. The public thinks they were all killed there, which probably makes it easier to hide ev
idence guns were involved. It’s sensational and exciting, a massive event in the professional hunting world. The internet is apparently abuzz with new developments and speculations.
I wander from my room to use the bathroom when Mom’s voice drifts up the staircase. “Shelter Valley is right next door. This is going to drive down our property value, Frank. How are we going to sell the house now?”
I halt. What do they mean, ‘sell the house’?
“The value will bounce back,” Dad says.
“In a year? Two? That’s too late.”
“We’ll find another way to buy an exit visa.”
“How? We’re already mortgaged to the hilt to pay Kathryn’s legal fees. We’ve gone to all the relatives. The bank won’t lend us another dime. I can’t quit my job to home school if we can’t sell the house. And the asylum scholarship…”
My breath goes very still in my chest. I listen so intently, I can hear my own heartbeat.
“She’s already falling apart and it’s only October. She’s not going to hold it together the whole school year. She needs to be home schooled. I don’t think she can take this.”
It was true. It was all true.
I hear my dad kiss her. He murmurs meaningless reassurances that we’d work this all out somehow. All I can think of is the desperation driving my mom. She’s willing to quit the job that she loves, sell the house that she loves, just to keep me alive.
Tears sting my eyes. I’m their only child. It’s going to hurt them when I get killed. But I’m hurting them anyway. I don’t know how to fix any of this. Mom’s right. I am falling apart.
All I can do is go back to my panic room with my comforter.
I just want to forget what I’ve done.
It’s the middle of the school day on Friday when our doorbell begins to ring. Over and over again, followed by a fist pounding.
I huddle down in the corner of my panic room. Please let whoever it is go away. Please let them leave.
“Kat! I know you’re in there. Kat!”
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